English

Noun

Secularity (adjective form secular) is the state
of being separate from religion. For instance, eating
and bathing may be regarded as examples of secular activities,
because there is nothing inherently religious about them. (Note,
however, that both eating and bathing are regarded as sacraments by some religious
organizations, and therefore would be religious activities in their
worldview.) Saying a prayer derived from religous text
or doctrine, worshipping
through the context of religon, and attending Sunday
School are examples of religious (non-secular) activities.
However prayer and meditation are not necessarily non-secular being
that the concept of spirituality and higher consiousness are not
married solely to any religion but are practiced and arose
indepedently across a continuum of cultures.

One approximate synonym for secular is worldly;
another could be phrased as neutral in religious matters.
Approximate antonyms for secular are religious and devout.

Despite occasional confusion, secularity is not
synonymous with atheism.

Origin of term

This word derives from a Latin word meaning
"of the age". The Christian
doctrine that God exists outside of time led medievalWestern
culture to use secular to indicate separation from religious
affairs and involvement in worldly (or time-related) ones. This
meaning has been extended to apply to separation from any religion, regardless of whether
it has a similar doctrine.

Modern usage

Examples of secular used in this way include:

Secular
authority, which involves legal and military authority as
opposed to clerical authority, or matters the church controls.

Secular
music, composed for general use, as opposed to Sacred music
which is composed for church use. Secular sonatas, in the 17th
century, were those which were not composed to be used in church
services.

Related concepts

Laïcité
is a French concept related to the separation of state and
religion, sometimes rendered by the English cognate neologism
laicity and also translated by the words secularity and
secularization. The word laïcité is sometimes characterized as
having no exact English equivalent; it is similar to the more
moderate definition of secularism, but is not as
ambiguous as that word.

Secularism is an
assertion or belief that religious issues should not be the basis
of politics, a movement
that promotes those ideas or (in the extreme) an ideology that holds that
religion has no place in public life. Secularist organizations are
distinguished from merely secular ones by their political advocacy
of such positions.

Laïcisme is the French word that most resembles secularism, especially in the
latter's extreme definition, as it is understood by the Catholic
Church, which sets laïcisme in opposition to the allegedly far
milder concept of laïcité.
The correspondent word laicism (also spelled laïcism) is sometimes
used in English as a synonym for secularism.